Recommendations are Exaggerations

It’s often said that if you’re thinking of buying something it’s a good idea to ask people you know what they would recommend. And I agree.

But it’s also a very bad idea too.

It’s a good idea because getting a recommendation is easy to do and it gives some degree of experience to factor in to a purchase that will otherwise be based on whatever the company or shop selling it wants you to focus on.

On the other hand, people tend to eulogise about products they’ve bought recently in a way that has always made me a little suspicious that they’re simply justifying a decision they’ve taken. Psychologically speaking that’s a healthy thing for them to do; who wants to be riddled with doubt each time you buy something (even though you’ll never know whether the other options would have served you better!).

Recent research looking at brain images of people making choices has uncovered evidence that we do indeed delude ourselves once we’ve made a purchase decision. In fact, it shows the delusion starts almost immediately.

Researchers looked at images of people’s brains as they imagined going on holiday to one of eighty different locations and asked them how much they’d like to travel to each place.

Then they asked them to choose between two that they’d rated similarly.

Not unexpectedly the respondents selected whichever location had activated the area of the brain associated with anticipations of reward more strongly. This part of the brain, the caudate nucleus, is also involved in helping people learn classifications and part of the same area that generates movement.

Within a few minutes of having made their selection participants were asked to rate the destinations again, and this time they rated the destination they had chosen higher. Revealingly, brain activation also increased.

Now, whatever had been chosen was associated by the brain with more reward than it was previously.

This research raises some challenging questions for consumer research: when a questionnaire or interview process solicits feedback on a product or asks customers to consider buying it, at the moment they decide (or are persuaded) that they would they choose it they will start to feel more positive about it, and talk about it in the same way.

In the real world, where the marketing communication for a product is far less direct and structured, this self-persuasion is far less likely to take place. This may go some way to explaining why so many new products that are endorsed by consumer research go on to fail when launched to consumers for real.

Of course, if you’re looking for people to give you positive testimonials for what you’re selling, asking them just after they’ve bought it might be a very good idea.

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Source:Society for Neuroscience (2009, March 28). Brain Activity Predicts People's Choices. ScienceDaily. Retrieved March 30, 2009, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2009/03/090324171554.htm